Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Venal and braying Eurotrash

In Jodhpur now, still on the trail of Liz Hurley, Arun Nayer and their vast retinue of guests who trailed through Mumbai's airport this morning looking very bleary eyed after a hard night's partying at Adi and Parmeshwar Godrej's stunning beachfront pad.

There's not much to envy about the lifestyles of the euro-Sloanes

As I boarded the scheduled Jet Airways service I followed two young society gals, wearing indecently short (for India, anyway) summer dresses as they tottered up the stairs to the aircraft, restorative tins of fizzy Miranda drink in hand.

If they feel like anything like I do – exhausted, hung-over – they only thing they and their fellow euro-Sloanes will really feel like doing is having a quiet night dangling their feet in a bowl of hot, soapy water and watching something rubbish on the telly.

Alas, I don't think that's what Liz and Arun have in mind. Today, after checking in to Jodhpur's best hotels, the party convened again in the great Umaid Bawan hotel, which looks old but was completed in the 1940s and is a posh, but regulation Rajasthani five star hotel.

My sources tell me that while the boys played cricket – a Liz XI v Arun XI – the girls had their hands hennaed in the manner traditional to an Indian wedding.

Sounds great? Well, having spent much of the last two days in close proximity to the Hurley entourage, I can honestly say there isn't much to envy.

It must be completely exhausting having to pancake on the make-up again and pull out another fresh frock, for yet another reception talking to much the same folk who bored you senseless last night.

I realize this may sound like bitterness or envy, but you have to see this bunch of braying Eurotrash up close to realize quite how venal and dreary the very rich are – it's been quite an education.

And interestingly, at the Godrej's, it was the Indians who shone with vitality. As one of the Brit guests knowingly observed to me, most of the 'foreign' guests have had serious millions for 'generations' – Liz herself, excepted of course – while the Indian crowd smelled rather of 'new' money.

Give me the Indians any day – people who, however cloistered they may be from the extreme poverty in which so many millions of their countrymen live – hum and fizz with ambition and belief in the future of India.